Take the impact of hearing the engaging
lyricism of Rigoletto for the first time. Mix it with the
"old west" swagger of Oklahoma. Throw in sugary
melodies a la Mozart or Puccini, a libretto in English, a true story
with a tear-jerker ending and some show-off opportunities for soprano
and mezzo virtuosos. The result is the opera The Ballad of Baby
Doe, composer Douglas Moore and librettist John Latouche's only
collaboration, and likely the high point of both of their careers.

A cumbersome piece—with eleven
scenes and thirty-two cast members, not counting the chorus: five
soprano arias, two baritone arias, a mezzo aria, a bass aria, two
soprano/baritone duets, a mezzo/baritone duet, a mezzo/women’s
quintet, five choruses. A long-ish piece as well: more than three
hours of running time when performed with the traditional single intermission.
Yet, since its 1956 premiere in the intimate confines of the Central
City (Colorado) Opera House, The Ballad of Baby Doe has turned
into one of the most performed of all American operas; second only
to Porgy and Bess.

Virtually every domestic opera troupe
has tackled it at one time or another. Countless opera novices have
found their previous notions about opera transformed by it. Died-in-the-wool
card-carrying DoeHEADS attest to uncovering previously unseen dimensions
of it in every performance. It is, in short, an American artistic
phenomenon of some order of magnitude.

Yet even today, almost fifty years
after its premiere, its appeal remains enigmatic, and even its legitimacy
as opera is frequently challenged. "Sentimental" and "dated"
were among the kinder charges leveled against it by critics of the
2000 San Francisco Opera production. One called it a “hodge-podge…[with]
an almost naïve, Main Street appeal that makes it much more dated
today than in 1956.”

Notwithstanding such doubled-edged
dismissal, The Ballad of Baby Doe is one of the most performed
stage works in the American classical repertoire. For better or worse,
the opera’s sheer staying power attests to some kind of appeal,
Main Street or otherwise, and raises interesting questions about where
it ultimately fits in the American creative pantheon. Despite critics’
sniffs, Baby Doe seems to hang around for the sheer uncomplicated
reason that lots of people like it: singers, opera buffs, people who
have no interest in opera but are attracted to the historical story.

A CHILD OF ITS TIME

Though perhaps not the “great
American opera,” it’s certainly something of remarkable
consequence in American musical history. Emerging at about the same
time as Broadway's West Side Story (both of them inadvertently
sharing a strikingly similar dramatic and musical moment on the measure-and-a-half
phrase accompanying the words "I have a love…"), Baby
Doe is an opera-as-musical counterpoint to Bernstein's musical-as-opera.
After concluding its successful debut summer in Colorado, Moore and
Latouche's opera was even being seriously considered for a Broadway
run, for which, hindsight suggests, it wouldn't have been well suited.
But that’s another discussion.

Curiously, its "popular"
inclinations, which derived no doubt from John Latouche's exceptional
pedigree in writing for Broadway, as well as Douglas Moore's own theatrical
aspirations, may be responsible for much of its success. Latouche
was a collaborator in staging Cabin in the Sky, The Golden
Apple, The Vamp and Candide, among others.
As a young man, Moore performed at The Cleveland Play House, and later
oversaw elaborate stage presentations in his own home by members of
his family, and friends such as John Kander, co-creator of Cabaret
and Chicago, and Jack Beeson, composer of Lizzie Borden,
The Sweet Bye and Bye and Hello Out There.

Baby Doe’s theatrical
sensibilities are unmistakable. Its first act opens during a celebration
outside “a brand new” opera house. Its last act concludes
on another opera house’s empty stage. Its best moments are “fourth-wall”
declarations to the audience by the main characters, e.g. "the
Willow song," "Augusta, how can you turn away?" and
"O God, ain’t there never no one…?" The story
even goes that Latouche and Moore found their inspiration in an instant,
while poking around the stage of the Tabor Opera House in Leadville,
Colorado. Whatever its origins, its creators have left us with a stage
work that somehow succeeds with audiences where other American operas
fail. No one can definitively say whether Baby Doe's attractiveness
comes from its text, or its music, or the harsh reality behind the
story, or a combination of all of the above. They are each components
in formulating the overall impact of the work, and each contributes
its own aura as such. Nonetheless, the fact remains that there appears
to be little else in American opera that can approach Baby Doe's
ability to move audiences on so many levels consistently over so many
decades.

That being said, Baby Doe is not without its issues. Its
length and relatively static stage action often leave audiences impatient,
especially if the production or the voices are less than interesting.
Its large cast and frequent scene changes require some ingenuity,
as well as adequate production resources to do it justice. On the
whole, it seems to have faired better in smaller houses than in larger
ones: as chamber opera, rather than “grand” opera. Indeed,
certain recent episodes appear to reinforce that notion.

In the 2000/2001 season, for instance,
there were Baby Doe performances in San Francisco, New York,
Salt Lake, Indianapolis, Norfolk and Bergen, New Jersey. While the
critics who’d seen it in the big houses bushwacked the work,
in the smaller venues, by contrast, audiences typically adored it
for its easy accessibility, its tonal clarity and the opportunity
it offered singers to act.

I’M READY FOR MY CLOSE-UP,
DR. MOORE

Then, in August of 2002, the Museum of TV and Radio in Manhattan,
screened a restored, long-lost kinescope of a live studio version
of Baby Doe done for ABC-TV's Omnibus
series. Attendees, seeing the film for the first time, were surprised
by how deeply they were drawn into the characters’ minds by
the TV camera's scrupulous eye; much moreso than on any of the from-time-to-time
televised showings of staged Baby Doe productions. And deeper
than they could have experienced while seated in even the jewel box
intimacy of Central City's 1878 auditorium. In that black-and-white
kinescoped performance, done in 1957, a year after the opera's premiere
(and not seen since), yet another Baby Doe was revealed--one
that seemed to stretch beyond the confines of the TV screen, while
at the same time being flattered by it. Despite being an otherwise
totally familiar work to those in the screening room, the work of
art known as The Ballad of Baby Doe was markedly changed
by its encounter with the picture tube. One could gaze into the eyes
of the singers. One could see them sweat. One could practically taste
their kisses. With the help of the close-up lens, an already powerful
theatrical story became even more compelling.

Douglas Moore was certainly no stranger to television. In 1951, a
few years prior to Baby Doe, Moore’s friend Gian Carlo
Menotti premiered Amahl and the Night Visitors, the world's
first "TV opera," on NBC. Moore himself shaped the Omnibus
Baby Doe presentation, overseeing the editing of the opera down
to an hour. Shortly thereafter, he even wrote a "TV soap opera"
opera--Gallantry--complete with commercials.

Though it was probably not intentional,
The Ballad of Baby Doe’s “small-screen”
affinity may nonetheless be significant. For though it makes an easy
first-impression when done on stage, the piece works especially well
the closer an audience can get to its characters, its text and its
music. Those who have an intimate acquaintance with the work, e.g.
performers, fans and real aficionados, argue that it reveals more
on each hearing, much as any great piece of art. And that the more
one knows of it and its story, the more interesting it becomes.

Yet some would say, as well, that
its “intimate” character may also be its weakness. Whereas
large-sized opera houses tend to favor grandiose works--a Tosca,
with its cathedral scene, or an Aïda, with its “Triumphal
March,” or a Carmen, with its bull ring--Baby Doe
seems to get lost in such a setting. Its charms are rather more subtle;
better suited perhaps to the living-room (or bedroom) than the town
square.

Of course, heavily populated stage
tableaux have always been attributes of grand opera. And Baby
Doe is no exception, i.e. the "dance hall" opening,
the Washington marriage reception, the Governor's Ball, the Bryan
election rally. They tend to be there primarily for backdrop purposes,
however, rather than as crucial plot elements; not essential to the
story, and more like scenery…albeit animated scenery, in a Greek
chorus kind of way. Even in the opera's final scene, which takes place
ON an opera house stage, and in which memories and specters haunt
a dying Horace Tabor, the overall effect is one of personal introspection
and redemption, rather than of some form of public witnessing. After
all the civic noise subsides, only the intimate and personal remain
on stage to see us to the conclusion.

THE MEANING IS NOT IN THE NOISES

The public is, in fact, the antagonist
in Baby Doe. In an opera in which none of the principle characters
is particularly villainous, in the typical "grand opera"
sense, society, and perhaps the era in which the story is set, constitute
the real adversaries. Horace and Augusta don’t hate one another,
as much as misunderstand each’s needs. Baby Doe isn’t
Augusta’s rival, but Horace’s champion. On the other hand,
throughout the piece, the crowd has expectations of all three that
are far higher than their capabilities. Indeed, whether Augusta's
friends, or Horace's cronies, or the guests at the Willard Hotel reception,
or the last act spectral chorus (which even sings a "grand opera"
chorale mocking Horace Tabor's failures), the members of public, in
this opera, seem all too eager to taunt the principal characters for
their inadequacies, their human frailties and their unconventionality.
What does it say, then, when, in the end, we are drawn to the Tabors
precisely BECAUSE OF those frailties and their departures from convention?

One is left with the impression that
this opera intima could easily survive without its “Greek”
choruses; that they only serve to reiterate thoughts that are also
handled elsewhere in the score. (Indeed, the current owners of the
Tabor Opera House in Leadville have recently had some success staging
it that way—with only three singers and a narrator.) The principal
characters’ inner broodings and personal manifestos are what
dominate The Ballad of Baby Doe. The musical and dramatic
high points aren’t the big concerted numbers, exciting as many
of them are, but rather the soloists’ arias in which the personal
puzzlings of each of the characters are put on display. This opera
works best in closer quarters because all of the important stuff happens
in the minds of the principals, and not in their interactions. Their
private ruminations, delivered via a series of inspired musical statements,
empower the opera with its unique capacity to pull deeply on an audience’s
own emotional heartstrings. Ultimately, it’s by virtue of the
main characters’ quiet longings, more than their passionate
outbursts, that we’re moved.

Baby Doe being performed on stage at the Tabor
Opera House, Leadville, 2002

A common charge is that there is
very little on-stage action in Baby Doe. Perhaps so. In opera
history terms, these characters emote, ala the static stages of Monteverdi,
rather than engage, ala the hot-blooded extravaganzas of Verdi? But
rather than a liability, their quietude, in the end, may be the source
of the opera’s powerful impact on audiences. Instead of declamations
of near-mythological epic figures, we have the musings of real historical
persons; Americans, with personal histories and feelings. As observers
of their struggles, we in the audience can relate; we can connect
to Horace and Baby and Augusta and their fears and heartaches. Far
from failures! Moore and Latouche have given us HEROIC characters,
who attain immortality through love and forgiveness, and who imbue
the opera with a spiritual dimension that derives from the classic
“American dream,” if not from some higher power.

One great advantage that it has,
unlike most operas from the great European canon, is historical fact.
The Ballad of Baby Doe owes its libretto to a true story;
one that audiences often know and can easily relate to, especially
if they've come across any of the themed Baby Doe restaurants, the
Tabor Center mall in Denver, the movie with Edward
G. Robinson or any of the dozens of articles and books that have
been published about the Tabors during the last century. It's not
at all unusual to find a remarkable percentage of the audience on
any given night, already familiar, if not intimate, with the story
and its outcome. Indeed, the story's very public visibility in the
early 1950s (at least in Colorado) probably allowed John Latouche
to achieve a level of authenticity in his libretto that, for the most
part, comfortably passes muster with the historical record.

TOWARD A NEW AMERICAN MUSICAL FORM

Even in purely musical terms, however, The Ballad of Baby Doe
is clearly something special. In the few decades since it was composed,
the opera has already worked its way into the hearts and minds of
countless musicians and opera lovers. Its arias have taken their places
in published anthologies. Its roles have become plum targets for young
singers. Virtually every American opera company, save the Met, has
performed it. And none of it could have happened without having Moore’s
remarkable score with which to start.

Such excellence was not necessarily
inevitable, either. At best, most of Moore's other works labor to
be memorable. In his recorded orchestral and chamber music, in his
other operas (including the deservedly celebrated Devil and Daniel
Webster), good melodies and convincing lyric follow-through are
the exception, not the rule. Baby Doe, by contrast, brims
with page after page of brilliance: singable melodies, beautiful harmonic
contrasts, evocative changes of rhythmic energy and bold dramatic
tension. And though he wrote another opera shortly thereafter, the
one-act Gallantry, which has some delightful moments, it
is vastly outdistanced by the Tabor opera in sheer tunefulness, in
melodic treatment and, ultimately, in audience appeal.

All the more astonishing, perhaps,
when considered in light of what else was being composed in the early
1950s! It was the time of a post-war revisitation of European musical
ideas on North American soil; ideas newly tempered by Nazi privations
and civil devastation: post-nuclear modernism, spare and brooding
noir staging, Sprechstimme, “honk-squeek” musical
angst. It was a period when an explosion of pent-up European artistic
energy burst onto the American musical scene with the help of powerful
new technologies--TV, long-play recordings, reel-to-reel tape recorders--to
disseminate everything more quickly, in more places and in greater
volume than ever before.

Douglas Moore was on the front line,
as head of music at Columbia University, where a gaggle of household
names were making their own richly prolific ways through the contemporary
creative scene. Between the end of World War II and the premiere of
Baby Doe, the Columbia Opera Workshop churned out eighteen
operas by the likes of Robert Ward, Henry Cowell, Gian Carlo Menotti,
Virgil Thomson, Jack Beeson, Lehman Engel and Otto Luening, with distinguished
help from Norman Corwin, Gertrude Stein, Langston Hughes and William
Saroyan, among others.

Moore’s creative impulses,
however, were somewhere else; stylistically removed from the frenzy.
At a time when most serious composition in Europe, and much of America’s,
was difficult for listeners to take, Moore was content to write unashamedly
melodic music. His style was steeped in Americana; paying homage to
parlor music, folk ballads, dance-hall high jinks and corn-bred hymn
singing. In fact, in Baby Doe, it seems that Moore's life-long
interest in developing an indigenous American music that drew upon
traditional songs and harmonies reached some magic culminating point.
It was as if all of his classical training (he studied with Nadia
Boulanger, Eugene Isaÿe and Ernest Bloch), his theatrical aspirations
(he performed as a young man and even had a stage in his living room
in Cutchogue, Long Island) his Yankee background (his family had settled
on Long Island's North Fork in the early 1600s) and his desire to
show the way toward an original musical form all came together around
the story of Colorado's most notorious Senator and his two devoted
wives.

Somehow it all clicked. Though they
were two distinct personalities, Moore and Latouche uncovered a certain
artistic synchronicity that allowed them to tap into the infinite
to create something enduring. For one brief period, their brains meshed
at a formidable level, reminiscent of other creative teams: Rodgers
and Hammerstein, or Gilbert and Sullivan, or, indeed, Verdi and Boïto.Together
the result was more powerful than either had ever achieved separately.
And, afterward, in the annals of history, their names would forever
be linked.

Sadly, John Latouche barely saw any
of Baby Doe’s success, dying a month after its premiere.
Douglas Moore, who lived another decade, saw the opera take New York
by storm, be preserved in a best selling recording, and then become
that rare item--an American opera that audiences WANTED to see again
and again. He completed four more operas after 1956, including Carrie
Nation, which gained some modest notoriety. But nothing…absolutely
nothing he did ever again matched the intense intrinsic power of The
Ballad of Baby Doe.

Humans have long used theatrical/musical
manifestations of various types to capture their cultural stories,
and to serve as a kind of secular community ritual: helping to define
their values, articulate their expectations, venerate their heroes.
The zarzuela in Spain, Japanese Noh theatre, Tibetan opera, Central
European operetta, French burlesque, music hall shows in Britain,
and even Broadway musicals in America, all present unique “takes”
on their distinct cultural scenes. With the possible exception of
classic Broadway material, however, these “operatic” forms
don’t generally travel well. When performed outside of their
particular milieus, they are seen largely as museum-piece artifacts--interesting
primarily as windows to other cultures--rather than as genuine entertainment.

The Ballad of Baby Doe,
likewise, has seldom ventured beyond the U.S. borders. The Santa Fe
Opera gave performances of it in Berlin and communist Belgrade in
1963. An indigenous German production (in a meticulous German translation
done by a descendant of famed music patron Prince Esterhazy) was mounted
in the Westphalian city of Bielefeld in 1984 (photos of which may
be seen in this website’s “performance” section).
In 2000 an English-language concert version was done in nearby Wuppertal.
And two largely unheralded recent productions in Great Britain round
out the totality of Baby Doe’s foreign exposure since
it debuted in 1956.

But should we take this lack of interest
as emblematic of some deficiency in the work? Is Baby Doe
America’s Zigeunerbaron, i.e. a frothy confection that
makes little lasting impression? Probably not. Its greatness may actually
be reflected in this inability to connect overseas. The fact that
middle America responds while Mitteleuropa doesn’t
should come as no surprise to us. For at the heart of the work we
know as The Ballad of Baby Doe are qualities that separate
it from other genres, and make it a unique work; not Broadway, not
exactly opera by European standards, or folk-opera, or some distorted
kind of cabaret, but a new, suitable-for-television thing. (A distinction
it shares, by the way, with Bernstein’s hits of the same era--Candide
from December of 1956, followed shortly thereafter by West Side
Story in January of 1957, both of which have never become quite
comfortable in standard comic opera, or Broadway musical or grand
opera niches.)

Baby Doe’s very “American-ness”
necessarily makes it less accessible to non-Americans, and renders
it a less comfortable fit among the European repertoire with which
it’s usually compared. Just as Americans have less appreciation
for the theatrical “dialect” that makes the works of Otto
Nicolai or Emmerich Kalman so popular with the residents of Vienna
or Munich, the base metal elements of Baby Doe are missing
from the European, Asian or African experience. Even educated people
on other continents have limited personal knowledge of the political
economics of westward expansion, or of the motley music of middle-class
parlors, dance halls, Appalachian front porches and American country
churches, or of the often liberating personal choices made by women
and men in the Old West.

Baby Doe’s authors
dug into their own backgrounds for inspiration, and eventually created
something that reaches deeply into America’s complex historical
psyche for its meaning and its source of power. For over forty years,
satisfied audiences across the country have attested to the effectiveness
of their effort. Having done so, however, Moore and Latouche may inadvertently
have compromised some of the work’s inherent universality. Like
good regional cuisine, or vernacular literature, which frequently
requires some palate development before it can be fully appreciated,
Baby Doe may, in the end, have been too narrowly defined
to allow for broader consumption. In their effort to create something
truly representative of the American “epoch,” Moore and
Latouche may have succeeded, far more than they could have expected,
in coming up with something that is truly new and unique; something
distinctly American; a form that is the first in its line, neither
fish nor fowl. But also, something of an outcast, standing apart from
conventional settings, while still always being judged against them.

As a stage production, Baby Doe’s
not a sure bet. In order for it to work, it must work on all levels:
dramatically, musically, emotionally, psychologically, spiritually
and intellectually. It is a multi-faceted challenge for stage directors,
for performers, and for audiences. If all of the challenges are satisfactorily
met, the result can be wonderful and transcendent. If the results
are shaky in any way, the work itself can seem inadequate or flawed
or, at least, disappointing.

But what seems to make it work at
all (and probably makes it the unique statement that it is, ultimately),
is the way in which it is able to put on stage, for all to see, the
distinctive, darker characteristics that are the fine-grain realities
of the American experience as a whole. Throughout American history,
the core of “the American dream” has involved overcoming
a similar kind of multi-dimensional life challenge, i.e. to achieve
success one must discern the right moments, have the right talents,
and use the right tools. Unlike Europe or Asia, where personal achievement
is often proscribed by ancestry or social class, the essence of every
American’s “pursuit of happiness” contains the notion
that, if one works cleverly and well enough, one can EXPECT to transcend
individual circumstances in order to achieve the full blossom of life’s
gifts. In the United States of America, perhaps in its purest form
since ancient Greece, there is an expectation that life might in theory
become art, and that a rich, art-full life may be spent in a kind
of theatrical pursuit of the opportunities that every new moment presents.
It’s an idea as familiar to the traders on Wall Street in 2003,
as it was to Augusta Pierce Tabor in Kansas in 1859, or Elizabeth
McCourt Doe in Wisconsin in 1877, or Horace Austin Warner Tabor in
Colorado in the 1880s.

HOW CAN A MAN MEASURE HIMSELF?

For many, though, the reality of
America has often been something quite different from the expectation.
A satisfying, “art-full” life in America has seldom been
a “slam dunk,” a point that the opera makes quite profoundly.
It’s especially easy now, in the beginning of the twenty-first
century, for us to recognize this, and other lessons that The
Ballad of Baby Doe has to teach us. Easier than it might have
been even a decade or two ago. Our own age has sharpened our appreciation
for the flaws in the American economic arrangement. The fickle fortunes
of late nineteenth-century silver “barons” like Horace
resonate more than ever in our current era, in which global corporate
meltdowns can decimate pensions overnight. The forty air miles between
the rusted tipples and ghost towns of Gilpin County and the empty
fifty-story skyscrapers that currently dot downtown Denver remind
us that booms and busts aren’t merely quaint historical moments
to be examined in retrospect. They have their current-day analogs,
that we must also live through.

The Baby Doe story contains bellwether
lessons about this messy old American life of ours; about our frequent
myopia over what’s really important, and about our resistance
to changes even in the face of overwhelming evidence; other lessons,
too, about hubris, and stubbornness, self-deception and fear. In Baby
Doe, three individuals (not a whole lot different from ourselves
we find) tackle their individual lives, suffer the inevitable consequences
brought on by their own limited vision, and leave us to ponder how
their motivations compare with our own. Horace grew up in the age
of the Bowie knife and pistol—a time when personal will and
“gumption” were enough to build empires. He died in an
age of markets and industrial capital; where the stock ticker, the
telephone and battleships made the difference. His downfall wasn’t
one of the heart, but of the head. He simply couldn’t cope with
the changes, and didn’t recognize his own vulnerability. His
relationships with Augusta and Baby Doe provided the stage on which
he played out his hopes and fears as best he could.

At a deeper level, though, the opera
talks to us about aspects of the American character that we lately
find missing from much of our public consciousness: tolerance, love,
faithfulness, reverence, forgiveness, immortality—attributes
that permeated our ancestors’ lives in a host of ways, but seem
fusty and outdated in our 24/7 electronic whirlwind. Attributes that
get drowned out by the stories of our might and our greatness and
our invincibility and our “godliness.”

The reason that Baby Doe
persists in animating audiences is that it tries to reconcile these
conflicting tendencies in our culture. It seeks to make sense of the
divide that defines the American character—the clash of the
masculine anti-intellectual warrior impulse, and the feminine, merciful,
nurturing impulse. If you will, the golden sun and the silvery moon,
to use the metaphorical language of the opera. In so doing, it speaks
to the great struggle that haunts us all; the conflict between so-called
high and low culture that plays itself out everyday in our popular
entertainment, our politics, our economy and our educational system.

Baby Doe speaks loudly to
the “cockeyed optimist” in us all, pointing up the folly
of holding on to adolescent passions long after adult prudence is
called for: a common issue in the American psyche, in which “irrational
exuberance” provides the enabling force to move on, when better
judgement and experience suggest settling down instead. In its own
way, this simple human story, in the guise of late nineteenth-century
Colorado history, and embellished by its transformation into compelling
stage drama, is able to drill down into the depths of every twenty-first
century American’s personal fears, and offer its own version
of how to interpret them. At base, it’s a cautionary tale; approachable
in all-too-familiar twenty-first century terms. The three main characters
are basically honorable folk, motivated by traditional notions of
personal integrity despite their various shortcomings. But each, also,
suffers from a stubborn, gaping disconnect from proportion and common
sense that ultimately leaves them lonely, exhausted and, in the end,
tragic.

The community ritual that this unique
theatrical experience provides, is certainly no magic lozenge for
all that ails us. It’s neither a prescription for deliverance,
nor a testament of beliefs to be trumpeted from the purple mountaintops.
It’s merely a story, from our country’s history, told
in a manner that pitted two men’s skillful imaginations against
the many dimensions of our rich creative traditions. The result was
something enduring. Something that, in the end, contains “sentimental”
and “old-fashioned” American virtues that come from, as
Lincoln said, “the better angels of our nature.” And there
may lie Baby Doe’s legacy. For, in the long run, those
virtues may be just the guideposts we need to clarify our way through
the myriad of choices we face in this vast and looming new century.